The Battey Muse

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

So, I have a monolithic development farm (DC, SQL Server, SharePoint 2016) all in one VM that I use to develop solutions for SharePoint. I had Visual Studio 2015 installed, but my coworkers wanted to start using Visual Studio 2017.

As you probably know, when you uninstall Visual Studio, it doesn't uninstall all of the stuff that comes along with it. So I removed all of the packages installed on the same date as Visual Studio 2015. The only thing is, I uninstalled WCF Data Services as well (v 5.6.0.0). I don't know why it wasn't listed on the day I installed SharePoint, maybe it was, and maybe I was a bit aggressive.

Well it turns out that CSOM requests (Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerRuntime) and it is dependent on Microsoft.Data.Edm and Microsoft.Data.OData(both v 5.6.0). These are both prerequisites for SharePoint 2016, but don't show up as a problem when just accessing the site. Here's the PowerShell code that would trigger the issue:

I first found the problem by trying to access the site via CSOM. Then I upgraded to a newer CU and PSCONFIG.exe failed. Checking the PSCONFIG.exe log I found I had the same problem. That lead me to this support post SharePoint 2016 Configuration failed, and it set me on the track to solve the issue.

I first tried to replace the individual packages, but that didn't work very well (I couldn't seem to download the right packages). So I re-ran the SharePoint prerequisite installer and that was the key to success.

Here's some of the errors from various logs that lead me to the solution. Maybe by posting these errors, it will draw people to this page if they come across a 400 Bad Request error from CSOM code.

From the Upgrade log:Exception: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Data.Edm, Version=5.6.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Exception: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Data.OData, Version=5.6.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

From the ULS Logs:

Error when processing types in server stub DLL Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerRuntime, Version=16.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c, Error=System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information. at System.Reflection.RuntimeModule.GetTypes(RuntimeModule module) at System.Reflection.Assembly.GetTypes() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ProxyMap.ProcessOneAssembly(Assembly azzembly, ClientServiceHost processorSurrogate) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ProxyMap.Init(ClientServiceHost processorSurrogate)

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Data.Edm, Version=5.6.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. File name: 'Microsoft.Data.Edm, Version=5.6.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35'

System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Data.OData, Version=5.6.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. File name: 'Microsoft.Data.OData, Version=5.6.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35'

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

As promised, here's a post on the design for a Security Token Service (Identity Provider) that integrates SharePoint (2010, 2013, or 2016 take your pick, one service covers all versions) and Microsoft's Azure AD (a.k.a. Passport, Windows Live ID, XBox Live ID, Live ID, Windows ID). The premise for such: Microsoft used to provide claims-based authentication for Windows Live IDs, but seems to have lost interest in supporting the interface (the certificate expired October 29th, 2013). Further, SharePoint doesn't accept OAuth2 tokens (even though it will provide them for "Apps").

So you may ask: Why not use the Azure AD SAML protocol endpoint? This is a really great question! When we started the project, information on the endpoint didn't come across our search scopes. Also, we had developed a number of Identity Providers integrated with web applications that inherited identity properties from a number of sources. Alas, as it turns out, none of these really mattered, because the Azure AD SAML protocol endpoint is described as an Oasis WS-Federation endpoint using three different signing certificates. This is something that SharePoint just cant consume (yet).

Here's some of the reasons why the Azure AD SAML endpoint wouldn't work:

Azure AD's Identity Provider endpoint lists three signing certificates, where SharePoint maps a single certificate to an Identity Provider

Azure AD requires a Metadata URI from the Service Provider which SharePoint doesn't provide natively.

Azure AD provides so many SAML assertions that SharePoint just doesn't need. This isn't really a failure, but something that can cause the SharePoint "Share UI" to become confused when assigning claims.

Monday, October 30, 2017

Hey all, I recently built a project that integrated Azure AD users (read this as Pasport, Xbox Live, Live ID, Windows ID, Azure AD, or what ever you really want) with SharePoint 2016 on-premises. Pretty straight forward task, build an OAuth2 application that converts to SAML 2.0 Passive Authentication, configure to authenticate with Azure AD and pass the info off to SharePoint.

Microsoft has some really great examples, that are built right into the App registration portal at https://apps.dev.microsoft.com. My task saw me building a "Web Platform" app. The how-to was straight forward, and I followed the steps in from the Guided Setup option when I registered my App. I choose "Server-side Web App," with the ASP.Net Web App (OWIN) guided setup.

The walk through is really great and even points some optimizations to ensure all of your MVC app is secured, vs. only the sign-in and sign-out actions. The example even provided a second controller (/claims) that helps you debug the results you get back from Microsoft.

The Pros

Probably the best thing about the sample is that it immediately shows authentication against the "Common" logon portal. This is essential for the application we were building, as very few of the users logging in would be from our organization. The other thing was that it just worked straight out of the box.

Everything was straight forward, copy code, add it to your app. Git some OWN packages and link them in too. Took me less than an hour to get everything up and running.

The Cons

So, Microsoft didn't follow their own best practices when putting the sample together with the default App registration.

It turns out that the whole system works great with the Office 365 out of the box security configuration. But some of our clients opted to configure their tenant to disallow users from consenting to data sharing. There's one setting that is either labeled differently in the Admin Portal and again in Azure AD configuration, or one directly changes the other (in the end they're a single setting). In the Admin Portal it's Settings -> Services & Add-ins -> Integrated apps. In Azure AD it's Azure Active Directory -> User Settings -> Enterprise Applications, Users can consent to apps accessing company data on their behalf(See below for screenshots).

When these are disabled, a Global Administrator must consent to the application to allow non-administrators the ability to log-on. Without that special consent, the admins can logon but no-one else.

Try as we might we just couldn't shake the error:

You can't access this application<FooBar App> needs permission to access resources in your organization that only an admin can grant. Please ask an admin to grant permission to this app before you can use it.

We followed every direction given to compose the admin authorization consent URL and consent to the application. Finally, based on a single article on Stack Overflow, we learned that the "Dynamic Scope" must match the "Microsoft Graph Permissions" configured in you application. When a Global Admin consents to an application, he/she is only consenting to those Permissions found in the App Registration, and not to a Scope passed in the consent URI. Supposedly, it was a new change...

The Fix

I wasn't sure how to harmonize the Microsoft Graph Permissions with what every my client was sending. To my knowledge, it wasn't sending anything. Then I started digging. In Step 2 of the guided setup (Titled Setup), you add a class derived from Object called Startup. OWIN apparently looks for this class when the assembly is loaded. I highlighted a line below.

It turns out that the configuration was requesting openid and profile, but the default registration for my app granted access to User.Read. As soon as I updated my registration to use only openid and profile, then used the Administrative Consent URL we were golden.

By the way, the Admin Consent URI is different for the V2.0 login endpoint, and has some limited documentation. We used on like this:https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/adminconsent?client_id=<APPID>&redirect_uri=<loginURL>

About Me

Matt has been developing software professionally for 25 years and started nearly 10 years before that. As part of a secret government program to train 11 year olds to hack, Matt started out on a brand-new Apple IIe, creating a database of G.I. Joe action figures and animating lo-rez graphics in Applesoft Basic.
Since then, Matt's moved on to OOA/OOD/OOP and is currently a distributed systems software architect and project manager.
Follow me on Twitter @MattBattey